Meet the Speaker: Connor Coley

Connor W. Coley is the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor at MIT in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech and MIT, respectively, and did his postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute. His research group at MIT works at the interface of chemistry and data science to develop models that understand how molecules behave, interact, and react and use that knowledge to engineer new ones, with an emphasis on therapeutic discovery.

Connor is a recipient of C&EN’s “Talented Twelve” award, Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” for Healthcare, Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, the NSF CAREER award, the ACS COMP OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award, the 3M NTFA, and was named a Schmidt AI2050 Early Career Fellow, a 2023 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year, a Scialog Fellow, and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Connor has been further recognized for his teaching and mentorship by MIT’s inaugural Common Ground Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Outstanding UROP Mentor Award in 2024, and the James W. Swan Outstanding Faculty Award for Graduate Teaching in Chemical Engineering in 2024 and 2025.